Without the gain reduction meter, I’m not sure that I would have noticed it working at all. Because there is both a “peak crest” and a “soft knee” adjustment, it was quite easy to optimize it for a kind of dual operation. This was the most transparent of them all, seeming not to add any color to the mix, while lightly touching the loudest hits. It had a nice “glue” to it as well, which is probably attributed to the numerous tubes in the signal path it recreates to convincingly. This one sat somewhere between the previous two, with a slightly creamier sound and a smoothness to the high end compared to the Alpha Master but it was perhaps a bit less thick than the Shadow Hills. Even though neither gain reduction meter was moving much, the mild compression was still pushing things together nicely. This could be attributed to the output transformer I selected (“Iron”) and the fact that there are actually two compressors running in series here.
This compressor seemed a bit thicker and slightly more forward-sounding.
In essence, a shootout that doesn’t explore a compressor audibly compressing would be of little use to someone who wants to compare the differences between different models and types of compressor. It makes sense that the character of a compressor is defined largely by the sound of its gain reduction scheme and circuit, so naturally, the more you use it, the more it reveals. There were definitely subtle variations in tone, but for the most part it wasn’t black and white, like “this one sounds the best”, or “this one will never work”. When they’re barely working, the differences between them all were somewhat insignificant. Once I had setup all 11 compressors to a very gentle setting (about 1dB of gain reduction) I was a bit surprised. I had to ensure that my assessment was as objective as possible so that you could know that I wasn’t just trying to steer you toward what I prefer. I used a 400Hz tone to make sure they were all nearly identical in terms of gain reduction and output level. I painstakingly set up each compressor as identically as possible, with regards to threshold, ratio, and attack and release times.
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